Seagate releases monster 180GB drive

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The launch of Seagate's Barracuda 180 has pushed back the finish line again in the race to have the largest hard drive on the planet. Anyone wanting to hold the title must now produce a drive with more than 180GB of space.

As well as being the biggest, it is also the quietest for its size - with an acoustic rating of 3.7 decibels. Idle power consumption is low too, at less than 10.3W.

At an RRP of $2195 this is not destined for the average home user, but is expected to sell well in data warehousing, e-commerce , data mining and A/V work. The actual pricing on the high street will determined by Seagate resellers.

The drive spins at 7,200 RPM, the data transfer rate tops out at 47 MBps, and will be available in the industry-standard Ultra160 SCSI interface. For Audio/Visual specific work, a 16 MB V-code cache option will be offered. ®

Bizarre storage statistic: For those of you having trouble visualising 180GB of data, Seagate tells us it is a stack of text documents three times the height of the Empire State Building. They didn't say what font size, so we don't know whether that is as impressive as it sounds. ®